


The Neighbour

by TrebleTwenty



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: In which I get emotional about Flame's backstory that I made up from half a wiki article, In which I understand very little of what my two characters are talking about, M/M, Prison, Science Boyfriends, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-15
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2019-10-29 03:19:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17800103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrebleTwenty/pseuds/TrebleTwenty
Summary: The ceiling was, as ever, grey. It was a very particular shade of grey, as selected by Autobot High Command, designed by a team of scientists to be calming; gently soothing the processor and promoting quiet reflection on all your life’s wrongs. Supposedly it stimulated a certain line of code in your motivator. Flame had met Prowl once, entirely by chance, and formed an opinion of the mech that he’d carried with him through every suicide run, seemingly pointless mission and rejected research proposal, and that was that he was a smug glitch who’d clearly deleted any line of empathy code he’d ever had years ago, and as such he highly doubted whether the colour of the ceiling was meant to promote anything other than the urge to stick his head against one of Fortress Maximus’s famed leg guns and tell him that what he did at Simanzi wasn’t really that impressive.Flame and Scorponok fall in love through their adjoining cell wall without ever seeing each other’s faces.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Vullet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vullet/gifts).



> I'm out here championing my best bro's rarepair for money, let scorpflame into your heart lads my best bro is a genius
> 
> (come talk to me on tumblr about me championing YOUR rarepair for money)

 

 

 

The ceiling was, as ever, grey. It was a very particular shade of grey, as selected by Autobot High Command, designed by a team of scientists to be calming; gently soothing the processor and promoting quiet reflection on all your life’s wrongs. Supposedly it stimulated a certain line of code in your motivator. Flame had met Prowl once, entirely by chance, and formed an opinion of the mech that he’d carried with him through every suicide run, seemingly pointless mission and rejected research proposal, and that was that he was a smug glitch who’d clearly deleted any line of empathy code he’d ever had years ago, and as such he highly doubted whether the colour of the ceiling was meant to promote anything other than the urge to stick his head against one of Fortress Maximus’s famed leg guns and tell him that what he did at Simanzi wasn’t really that impressive. 

Apparently blue had been one of the other options. Primus, Flame would love to be looking at the colour blue right now. He fantasized about Fort Max ordering the decorators in, at night, when he was supposed to be recharging. It wasn’t what you might call a valuable use of his time, but it had been so long since he’d done anything worthwhile that he’d forgotten what it felt like. 

There were three scuffs on the ceiling, right at the end next to the door. They were accompanied by a medium sized gauge the approximate size and shape of someone’s claw, if that someone had flown into a sudden frenzy and tried to rip the cell door off, before being felled by a sharp shock from the electrified defenses on the door. Flame’s followed the action down, and he noted the matching scuffs on the floor where the would-be escapee had landed. He felt he could sympathise. Lying on this sub-par berth musing on the colour of the ceiling could drive even the staunchest of mechs mad, and in fact  _ had _ . Flame himself had found himself touching the electrified field and giving himself a shock just to stave off boredom a, uh, non-zero number of times.

In the distance, a door swung open. Huh. This was sort of interesting, as they weren’t due any kind of inspection for another few weeks. Flame briefly considered sitting up for this unprecedented turn of events and then thought better of it. This ceiling wouldn’t study itself. He hoped that if he spent enough time staring at it without pause he might be able to scare it into being blue.

He heard a muted crash and somebody hissing ‘frag!’ in a very poor attempt at an indoor voice. 

Anyway.

He’d considered making his own mark on his little grey box, but that just seemed so… cliché. A lot of mechs would be keeping some kind of countdown of their time inside, scratched into the walls with their fingertip, or clawtip if they were lucky enough to have one, but Flame had considered it when he arrived and decided against it. For one, it would play havoc on the paintjob - he was  _ not  _ spending his time inside with an unpainted finger like some sort of scruffy… well, criminal, and it was unlikely that Fort Max would be running a touch-up service. For the other, those kinds of marks usually functioned as a countdown, and that only worked if you knew when you were getting out. Flame fully expected to be in here until Optimus Prime won and moved him to some secure facility on Cybertron to invent boring nonsense to aid in the resettling of the planet, or Megatron won and had him shot. 

“Primus, he’s fragging heavy,” a guard hissed, from almost right outside his cell. 

“Shut up,” snapped another.

“Maybe he wouldn’t be so heavy if you’d actually fixed the suspension like you were supposed to, Hitch!” said a third. 

“Look at the size of him!” That was presumably Hitch protesting. 

A wheel squeaked in protest. Flame sat up. The door of a cell creaked open at an audial-splitting pitch, and Flame’s head snapped around. It was not his cell. Why had he bothered sitting up again?

Some guards-slash-repairmechs (they seemed to be multi-purpose) were busy unloading someone into the cell next-door to him. By unloading, Flame meant undoing the restraints on the trolley and letting him fall face-first onto the floor with a resounding crash. He got up to investigate but could only make out a couple of the guards - one of them was bright red - and the empty trolley from his door, and he certainly wasn’t shoving his face against it to try and get a better look. 

“Shut the frag up!” Came an incredible bellow from in the distance somewhere.

“Shouldn’t we… you know… put him on the berth?” One of the guards said hesitantly. 

“ _ You _ want to try lifting him?” Hitch asked. 

“He’s got a point.”

“What’ve you got in there, mechs?” Flame asked. Hitch shrieked. 

“Calm down, you moron, it’s just Flame.” Another guard whacked him on the shoulder. Flame did his best not to remember their names. He’d have to put some work into forgetting Hitch later, in between threatening the ceiling in the hopes of it producing some blue. 

“What do you want, traitor?”

“I don’t want a neighbour,” Flame said. He tried not to sound petulant but suspected he might have failed. 

“Well, that’s a real shame,” said Hitch, “because you’re getting one.” He really needed to stop talking soon if Flame was going to have any chance of scrubbing him from his mind.

“You could have asked.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, are you not happy with how the prison is being run?” The other guard demanded. “I’m sorry we’re not meeting your lofty standards. You want a suggestion box or something? A little union of prisoners so you can fight for your rights together? Guess what,  _ traitor _ ?” He jabbed a savage finger in Flame’s direction, stopping scant inches from the bars. Flame glanced down at it, unimpressed, and then back up. The guard hesitated at the lack of reaction, clearly expecting a flinch. 

“You don’t  _ have _ any rights!” Jab, jab, jab. “Because you’re a filthy traitor!” Jab!

“Are you done?” Flame sighed. “Look, it’s not  _ my _ fault that the Autobots don’t want to win.  _ I  _ was trying to help.  _ They  _ were being ungrateful. Can’t you put him upstairs somewhere? I know for a  _ fact  _ there’s no-one next to Flywheels.”

“Flywheels discovered Primus, I’m not going up there,” said Hitch. “You’re stuck with him.”

“Wonderful,” Flame said. It was not wonderful. “That’s such a professional attitude. Thank you for inflicting a huge decepticon on me because you’re too lazy to walk up stairs.”

“Hey!” Barked one of the guards, the red one this time. “Less chat from you, prisoner!” He brandished his shock stick. Flame briefly considered getting himself zapped just so he didn’t have to process this situation, then put his palms up in surrender and backed away from the cell door. 

The Primus-damned neighbour’s cell door squeaked shut horrifically again, and was locked in due course by a group of guards now tired of Flame’s drab little corner of the prison and excited to get back to what probably should have been their usual posts but what was almost definitely the break room. Nobody would be crazy enough to try and break someone out of Garrus-9. Flame retreated back to his berth and sat down slowly, gingerly, half-convinced that any noise he made would wake his new neighbour up from his presumably heavily drugged stupor. Why this was so terrible, he couldn’t have explained. In the back of his mind he thought he’d probably gone a little bit strange after all the time by himself but he ignored that voice in favour of the louder voice screaming about how the neighbour was going to DISTURB HIM, in horrifying and undefinable ways.

He’d planned to count the imperfections in the surface of the left-hand (when facing the door) wall tomorrow. How was he to do that now?

 

 

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

As Flame booted up the next morning, ready for another exciting day of threatening the ceiling and resisting the urge to grab onto the bars and shock himself into unconsciousness, he slowly became aware of a strange tapping noise that he couldn’t for the life of him identify. Booting up was hard, nowadays, to say the least, his systems picking up on his general malaise and needing some not-so-gentle coaxing from his motivator to even bother waking up, but this new noise penetrated straight through his sluggish processor and had him sitting up and on high alert in three seconds flat. Overly-familiar as he was with any and all details of his never-changing environment, hearing something new was the biggest shock his systems had had since-

Well. He didn’t like to think about that. 

Looking around his cell didn’t give him any clues, and as he hunted for leaks, the tapping continued. It sounded tinny, almost. It echoed. It was then that he remembered the groundbreaking events of last night. 

“Will you stop that?” Flame snapped. The tapping stopped. 

“So, you’re online, then,” the new neighbour said warily. Flame jolted. 

What a voice. What. A. Voice. Deep and rumbly, he could swear he’d felt it vibrating right through his plating. He could listen to that voice recite the periodic table of elements - all 132 of them. Wait, no, that wasn’t a very evocative metaphor, he quite liked the periodic table of elements. Sometimes he recited them to himself to keep calm. He’d had to stop a few years back, when he forgot atomic number 108. After that, it was just stressful. 

No, this voice was  _ so  _ deep and  _ so  _ rumbly that he got a hot little shivery feeling in his spark imagining it reading out the Tyrest Accord, of all things, and nobody wanted to listen to the Tyrest Accord, not even the Duly Appointed Enforcer of the Tyrest Accord. Flame had met that guy once too, not long after he met Prowl, and  _ he’d _ been a riot.

Struck dumb by the most wonderful voice he’d heard in several vorns, he realised he’d been silent for a little longer than could be considered normal. He heard a couple of creaks from next door that indicated his neighbour was getting restless, so, naturally, he opened his mouth and diffused the situation by growling-

“What’s it to you?”

-in a hostile manner. He was truly a paragon of diplomacy. 

“We’re going to be spending the foreseeable future with only each other for company,” the neighbour replied. “I thought it might be nice to get to know each other, if that’s alright.”

“What about the guy on the other side?” Flame grumbled. 

“I’m on the end.” Ah, frag. “What about the guy on  _ your  _ other side?”

“You know what, I don’t know?” Flame mused. “Maybe he died.”

“Huh,” said the neighbour. “Fancy that.”

There was an awkward pause, in which Flame wondered what actually had happened to the mech next to him. At some point there had been one, he knew that much, but he didn’t really remember when there’d stopped being one. Strange. 

“You know,” Flame said. “I haven’t had a real conversation for about thirteen years.” It could easily have been anything from thirteen to eighteen years since the other guy disappeared, but he decided he’d go for the option that seemed least pathetic.

“That’s, uh, horrible,” said the neighbour. 

“How long has it been for you?”

“Since I had a conversation?” the neighbour mused. “Well, I guess I had a conversation with Ultra Magnus on the way here.”

“Why are you so bad at it then?”

The mech next door burst into sudden, startled laughter, just as deep and lovely as his speaking voice was. Flame, try as he might to stamp it down and bury it deep within his spark, felt a frisson of pride at making that sound happen. Usually when he spoke to a mech they threatened to taze him. 

“You know mech, I like you,” the neighbour said, slightly breathlessly. “I’d love to put a name to the voice. Who am I talking to?”

“You’re talking to me,” Flame said. “Duh.”

“Primus,” Flame heard the mech mutter, and couldn’t help but snort in amusement himself. This kind of thing was probably why Prowl kept trying to send him on suicide missions.

“What’s your damned name, mech?” the neighbour tried again. 

“Why, what’s  _ your _ name?” Flame retorted.

“Tell me, are you always this difficult, or did I do something to offend you?” the neighbour asked, a little testily.

“It’s a talent of mine,” said Flame. “Now tell me who you are.”

“What?” The neighbour spluttered. “I asked you first?!”

“Well  _ I  _ asked you second!”

“You’re being unreasonable!”

“What can I say, I’m an unreasonable mech,” Flame said. “Now spill.”

“I’m not telling you anything if you’re going to be like this,” the neighbour said defensively.

“Why would I tell you my name?” Flame demanded. “You could be anyone in there. You could be a  _ spy _ .”

“Why would I be a spy? You’re already in jail.”

“You don’t know anything about me,” Flame huffed. “I could be a notorious Decepticon pirate for all you know. They’re trying to find out where I buried my treasure.”

“Like frag you have treasure,” the neighbour said.

“I don’t,” Flame admitted, “but the point is I  _ could _ . And I wouldn’t tell you where it was.”

“Wow, thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

The neighbour sighed, and shifted around restlessly. Flame heard the berth creak. That guard must not have been exaggerating when he said look at the size of him last night. Hench or something, hadn’t it been? By Primus, Flame hoped he was wrong.

“So you’re really not going to tell me your name,” the neighbour said, after a moment.

“Nope,” replied Flame, emphasising the word with a deliberate pop on the p.

“I must say that I’m quite offended by the notion that I might be a fragging Autobot spy,” the neighbour commented.

“Being mistaken for an Autobot would be terrible,” Flame agreed. “I’d hate for someone to think I was a car.”

“Ha!” The neighbour barked a laugh. “They  _ are  _ all cars, aren’t they?”

“You can’t have an army full of cars, that’s just silly.”

“And yet they manage.”

“Despite their best efforts to the contrary,” Flame said. “They manage.” 

“It’s annoying as hell, we should have steamrolled them years ago,” the neighbour replied. “Like Tarn always said, the enemy isn’t the autobots, it’s bureaucratic incompetence.”

“Tarn?” Flame squeaked in alarm. 

“Oh, you never met him?” The neighbour said idly. “You’re not missing much, he’s a pompous aft if ever there was one. No respect for my work.” 

Flame was panicking. He wasn’t ashamed to admit it. The new neighbour had once been close enough to Tarn,  _ Tarn  _ of all mechs, to have a  _ conversation  _ with him, a conversation casual enough that Tarn had griped about the internal affairs of the Decepticon army…..

Who in the  _ pit  _ was in the cell next to him?

“I suppose he wants to kill me now,” the neighbour commented idly. “Well, the feeling’s mutual.”

“Forgive me if I, uh, don’t take quite so blasé an attitude to the Decepticon Justice Division,” Flame grumbled.

“Yes, well, Tarn rather loses his fangs when you’ve seen him pontificating on the impact of a semi-colon in chapter 7 of  _ Towards Peace _ .”

“Tarn is a  _ nerd _ ?”

“ _ Hah! _ ” The neighbor exclaimed. “The  _ worst _ . He’s always talking about poetry, and he’s a right kiss-aft.”

Flame giggled. The hulking purple horror story whispered about in dark corners, in Autobot platoons and among Decepticon P.O.W.s, seemed much less scary when Flame imagined him lecturing people about punctuation.

“Of course, sometimes talking about literature is worse than torture,” the neighbour continued. “He’s a nightmare.”

“You don’t have to worry about that here,” said Flame. “I don’t even know the difference between a simile and a metaphor.”

“I think he tried to tell me that once…”

“And?”

“No clue.” 

Flame smiled. 

“I suppose you’re right though,” the neighbour mused, “about being here. Maybe it won’t be so bad after all.”

“Yeah,” Flame said, and he thought he might even mean it. “Maybe.”

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the funniest thing about this is that I now can't remember if that guard earlier was called hench or hitch so like, big mood flame

 

 

“I was wrong,” said the neighbour. “What I said before was wrong. This is fucking awful. There’s nothing to  _ do  _ and nothing ever happens.”

“You’ve been here like, a week,” Flame grumbled. “Shut up.”

“ _ You  _ shut up,” the neighbour grumbled.

“Now who’s rude?”

“Ah, fuck off.”

“You say that a lot. What does ‘fuck’ mean?” Flame wondered. 

“Oh!” The neighbour exclaimed. There was a creak, like he was sitting up straighter. “It’s  _ fantastic _ . I learnt it when I was on Earth. Its meaning is very similar to frag, in that it means to fornicate, but it’s so much more than that!”

“Isn’t that exactly what frag is?” Flame asked, nonplussed by the treatise. 

“It’s an adjective-”

“Like frag.”

“-the act itself-”

“Like frag.”

“-a verb-”

“Like frag.”

“-an  _ exclamation _ -”

“Look, er, neighbour person. This is just the same word as frag.”

“It’s just better! Can’t you feel it?”

Flame thought for a moment, turning the two words over in his mouth. 

“I guess I can see the appeal of fuck,” he decided. “It’s explosive.”

“ _ Thank you _ !” the neighbour exclaimed. “I  _ much _ prefer it.”

“Did you like Earth, then?” Flame asked. “I’ve only been to a couple of planets and I nearly died on all of them.”

“If I discounted planets because I nearly died on them, well, I’d discount a lot of planets,” the neighbour said. “I really liked Earth, though. The inhabitants were tiny! They weren’t even two metres high, on average. I was a lot bigger then, too.”

“You should have stayed big-” Flame snorted. “-and then Hitch wouldn’t even have been able to carry you up here.”

“I thought his name was Hench?”

“What? No! Don’t tell me his name!” Flame cried in dismay. “You weren’t even  _ conscious _ !”

“I heard him named before I was drugged for the transfer. I like to make a point of remembering the little details. You never know when they might come in handy.”

Flame glared at the wall in roughly the position he imagined his neighbour might be sitting on the other side of it. 

“I hate remembering the little details,” he grumbled. “They’re boring and I don’t care about them. Hench doesn’t  _ deserve  _ to have his name remembered.”

“Ah, I do love your outlook,” the neighbour said. “It’s astonishingly bad-tempered.”

Safely separated from him by the cell wall, Flame couldn’t help but smile. He then immediately felt like an idiot.

“I suppose I always did like organics,” the neighbour mused, “in a way that most Decepticons really, really don’t.” He chuckled briefly. “I’ve always felt they have a certain… inventiveness to them, something that long-lived machine races, like us, and like the ammonites, lack.”

“I guess I never really thought about organics much,” Flame said. “The squishies were always just sort of… there. Most of them are dead within a vorn, anyway. They hate us all.”

“And we hate them,” the neighbour finished for him. Ah yes, Flame thought, that was the Decepticon line - that he totally bought into, if he meant to pass himself off as a Decepticon for the foreseeable future. He would have to fry himself on the electrified field over the cell door if his neighbour ever found out he was an Autobot. It would be fragging embarrassing. 

“I never bought into that line of thinking myself,” the neighbour was saying. “No, we have things to learn from the organic races of the galaxy. That hatred is borne of a lack of understanding, on both sides, so I set out to understand.”

“So you specialised in organic science?” 

“Xenobiology was never exactly a Cybertronian elective.” The neighbour chuckled. “No, I wasn’t built with science in mind. It’s just something I’ve picked up over the years.”

“It sucks,” Flame agreed. “Not being built for science. I’d love being a spectrometer.”

“Spectrometer, hm?” The neighbour asked with his horribly lovely voice. “I must say, I’m even more curious about  _ your  _ field of expertees, now.”

“ _ You first _ .” Flame grumbled. The neighbour laughed.

“I learnt so much on Nebulos,” he sighed. “That was an excellent planet, until  _ Ultra Magnus  _ turned up.” He spoke the name Ultra Magnus with such bitter vitriol that Flame was taken aback, finding the tone at odds with his so-far chatty and personable nature. 

“Not a fan, huh?” Flame asked.

“Nobody, not even Megatron, has done more towards ruining my life over the past 4 millenia than Ultra Magnus,” the neighbour spat. The mysterious clicking sound had started up again, but although it was clear it was the neighbour making it as some kind of stress response, Flame couldn’t work out what part of his frame was doing it. It was a very unique noise - not like an engine ticking over or even him just tapping one of his hands against the wall. “The operation on Nebulos was proceeding perfectly before he arrived. I had to tear down  _ years  _ of work.”

Flame thought of when Prowl had caught up with him, and all his external files had been destroyed. He got the impression Prowl would have gone for the internal files too, if the Autobots hadn’t been right in the middle of a series of messy war crime trials. 

“I feel you,” he said. 

“The perfect union of the organic and the cybernetic.” The neighbour sounded wistful. “It was the closest I ever came. The scientific thinking on Nebulos was just so compatible with my own - they didn’t believe in boundaries, either. You should never try to leash innovation.”

Yeah, it was official; Flame really liked this guy. The way to his spark was through science without limits and the neighbour was speaking his language. 

“In many ways,” the neighbour continued, “they were even more advanced than we are. Please, keep your disbelief to yourself-”

“I didn’t say anything-”

“-because I was truly sad to leave the Cranium behind. Usually, I could leave a planet -  _ or flee from the Duly Appointed Enforcer _ -” he growled this in a bitter tone “-without regrets, but I found Mo Zarak to be the perfect host.” He sighed wistfully. “I’ll never forget the specimen we’d created. It’s the  _ future _ , my mysterious friend. As they augment themselves with cybernetic enhancements, so too should we be looking to organic races to improve ourselves. They can  _ reproduce _ , almost  _ effortlessly _ , while we keep dying in ever more pointless ways for a war most of us are just fighting out of habit.”

“Huh,” Flame said after a moment. “I wasn’t sure where that was going. I can’t say I expected it to arrive quite where it did, though.” 

“You’re sceptical; I can tell,” said the neighbour. 

“Not necessarily,” Flame said. The clicking stopped. “Just never thought or cared about organics much, is all.”

“Not many of us do,” the neighbour replied after a moment. “I’m delighted by your open mind.”

“Me not caring about organics is an open mind?”

“It’s a step up from abject hatred and disgust,” said the neighbour, “which is sadly rife within our faction. It’s like Megatron thinks we have to choose between ridiculous Autobot notions of protection of lesser life forms and  _ ‘freedom is the right of all sentient beings’ _ -”

“You do a marvellous Optimus Prime impression.”

“-oh. Thank you. Anyway, it’s like it’s between that and exterminating them all. Call me mad, but it seems like there might be some kind of middle ground there.”

“You’re not one for altruism, then, I take it?” Flame asked. 

“Of course not,” the neighbour sniffed. “It’s their business to protect themselves. All this Autobot coddling is nonsense.”

Flame marvelled at this refreshing attitude. 

“I guess I can see the point of organics,” he said, “but I’m not sure what the point of us reproducing would be.”

“I must say, that’s not the part people usually have trouble with,” the neighbour said. 

“I mean-” Flame shrugged, alone in his cell, and then immediately felt silly. “-we’re all going to die in the war anyway. We don’t need any more mechs to do that. It’s not like we’re going for a record or anything.” He winced as he finished, embarrassed. He’d tried to sound flippant, resigned, but he worried that the neighbour had heard his underlying sadness. After all, the idea of the war ending couldn’t seem anything but impossible to a mech that had known nothing else. 

“Are you sure?” the neighbour teased. “I think we should at least try and beat the ammonites.” Flame laughed out loud, an equal mix of genuine humour and relief. 

“I wonder if anyone’s kept count,” Flame said. 

“Mmm. I doubt anyone can bear it.”

“That’s a cheerful thought.”

“What can I say? It’s a cheerful situation. Now come on,” the neighbour prompted. “I’ve told you about me. What’s your field? What dastardly scientific misdeeds did you do to end up in here?”

Flame opened his mouth, but nothing came out. 

In the life of an M.T.O., even an Autobot one - the ones that called themselves the good guys - there were not a lot of opportunities for peer-to-peer scientific discussion. For most of his life his value had lain in his ability to hold a blaster and use it to kill as large a number of the other side’s newly built cannon fodder as possible before they got you first. He’d never met another scientist, not really, not one that saw him as an equal, and now, faced with the prospect of a meeting of minds with this mech, brave enough to have wild ideas about organics and mad enough to apply them to his own species, his spark qualied. What if? What if the neighbour thought him ridiculous? What if the neighbour didn’t like his ideas? Didn’t like  _ him _ ? 

“Are you still alive in there?” the neighbour asked. 

“No,” said Flame. 

“That’s a pity,” the neighbour replied, sounding a little hurt. “I was looking forward to hearing about your work.”

“That’d be a first,” Flame grumbled. He groaned, and let his head thunk back against the wall.

There was an answering thunk from behind it, as the neighbour joined him in a companionable silence. If the wall wasn’t there, Flame could have rested his head on the neighbour’s shoulder. Or his lower back, he reconsidered, as Hench or Hitch or whatever’s assessment of the neighbour’s relative size came to mind. 

“Before the war, I was one of the gladiators in the Kaon arena, you know,” the neighbour said conversationally. Flame couldn’t even begin to think about how much older than him that made the neighbour. “I suppose I always had a certain curiosity about me, but no way to indulge it, for so many years.  _ I  _ never had any kind of formal education, if that’s what you-”

“Shut up,” Flame snapped. “You’re not going to get it. So just- don’t try. Leave me alone, please.”

“I-” the neighbour stopped and reconsidered “-if that’s what you want.”

“Thank you,” Flame said quietly. They sat together but apart, while Flame sulked and the neighbour made his mysterious clicking noise. He was desperately grateful the neighbour hadn’t pressed the issue, perhaps even more reluctant to let him know he was an M.T.O. than he was to let him know he was an Autobot. 

“Tell me about Kaon,” Flame said on impulse. “I’ve never seen it.” Immediately, he cringed. Was that too suspicious? Could the neighbour tell, even from that, that he was  _ pre-built cannon fodder _ ?

“What would you like to know first?” the neighbour asked quietly. 

Flame leant back against the wall and offlined his optics, trying to picture the scenes that the neighbour painted for him in that rumbling voice of his; first the arena, with thousands of mecha chanting his name, then the maze-like, winding streets and the towering industrial complex. Even the slag pits were described with a fond wistfulness, and Flame found himself nostalgic too, for a place and a planet he’d never even seen. 

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Science is gay lads, you heard it here first.  
> God it’s so weird to think that this ship I’m basically convinced is canon probably counts as a crack ship to most people.   
> As always, shoutout to my buddy, the visionary Flame kin that changed all our lives with this concept, and also paid me to write abt them. Love that.

After what Flame was calling the ‘Kaon Incident’, the neighbour seemed to think they had bonded (which they had, but Flame would rather die than tell him) and kept trying to get him to open up about his own past. The day he’d asked where he hailed from had been awkward, to say the least. Flame had had to do a lot of creative talking to get away from that one.  
By creative talking, Flame meant going to sit on the other side of the cell and not replying.  
A true paragon of diplomacy.  
It’d taken a while, but he finally seemed to have got the hint that Flame didn’t want to talk about his past. He didn’t seem happy about it, but he’d have to deal with that by himself. They were finally getting back on track; laughing about the neighbour’s stories about various well-known Decepticon figures (Skywarp sounded like quite a character, and Starscream sounded like a nightmare) and asking questions about the alien species the neighbour had come into contact with during his travels.   
It was fascinating, hearing about organics from the neighbour’s point of view. Flame had always concentrated on the Cybertronian physiology while he was learning, so most of what was said was new to him. What he’d told the neighbour was true - he’d never really thought about organics in any great depth before, considering them to just be the slightly hostile owners of planets he’d been sent to die on, but listening to the neighbour talk with passion about Nebulons and Eurythmans and even Dire Wraiths, Flame began to consider that they could be fascinating to study in their own right, or even scientific peers. The neighbour’s passionate treatise on Dire Wraiths’ particular quirks of biology set Flame’s processor racing, thinking about how those traits could apply to Cybertronians, how they’d help him streamline his spark transfer process…  
“Um… You? Hello?” The neighbour called after Flame fell silent and a part of his processor that felt almost atrophied spun into life, pulling out his calculations on the rate of burnout after spark removal and comparing it to what the neighbour had told him about Dire Wraiths infecting a host. Sparks weren’t designed to leave their chambers - even a full frame refit was built around the original chamber, processor and life cord - but the Dire Wraith could bend a host to its will with ease. He’d been looking for a breakthrough for so long.  
“Did you get a sample from them?” Flame demanded without thinking. If he thought of the Spark as infecting the new frame, then yes, then maybe-  
“I don’t know,” the neighbour said hurriedly, taken aback. “I stole the data. I wasn’t on that mission.”  
“Frag!” Flame cursed. “Primus, that could be it. Don’t you see?”  
“...no,” the neighbour said slowly. “As you haven’t told me anything about yourself or your area of expertees at all.  
“Fuck,” Flame said, with great feeling. The neighbour was right, it was better.  
“I’ve been dying to know for a long time,” the neighbour said, “but I’m even more intrigued now that I know that the finer points of the physiology of Dire Wraiths might be of importance.”  
“It could be it…” Flame muttered to himself, his spark fluttering in a panic, his plating feeling hot and tight. There was no way he could talk about this, no way at all.   
“I- I can’t,” he choked out. No matter what the neighbour said, he couldn’t.   
“I told you about me,” the neighbour said. Was Flame imagining it, or had his voice gone cold? “It can’t be any more embarrassing than organics.”  
“Try horrendously illegal,” Flame said.   
“We’re in prison,” the neighbour replied dryly. Well, that was true.   
Investigations of the nature of the spark like those Flame had been carrying out were never just illegal, though. They were immoral, unimaginable, unnatural. Even those who’d been through full frame refits, who might be expected to take a more lenient view of something like a spark transplant would look at anybody who even mentioned the possibility with disgust, offended at the implication they didn’t still possess the life cord they were onlined with. The religious were offended on behalf of Primus, and even the staunchest atheist would feel an instinctive shudder of revulsion if you spoke about removing the spark from its natural home. There was no reason the neighbour might be any different.   
“It’s not-” Flame tried again “-it’s not like organics at all. It’s kind of, well, it’s kind of wrong.”  
“No such thing,” the neighbour said immediately. Flame felt the same, of course, but would the neighbour still mean it when he found out what Flame had done?   
Flame wondered when he’d grown to care so much about what this stranger thought of him. He was ashamed of himself for being so needy, but the idea of the neighbour never talking to him again after hearing about this was unconscionable.  
“Fuck,” he said again, with great feeling, trying to gather his courage, which despite his forced profession he’d never found he had very much of. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”  
“You’re really embracing that one, wow.”  
“Sparks!” Flame burst out before he could change his mind. “I do sparks!”  
There was a moment of shocked silence.  
“Well,” said the neighbour, “that’s fun.”  
“I mean- I don’t-” Flame stuttered, quite ready to throw himself into the electrified cell door.  
“What do you do with the sparks, exactly?” The neighbour asked. “Measure their output? Turn them into lamps? Chew on them as a light snack while you build short-range missiles?”  
“You’re laughing at me!” Flame snapped. “Stop that!”  
The neighbour sniggered. “I apologise, but it’s very easy. Besides, everyone knows Rust Sticks are the best snack for missile assembly.”  
Flame let out a disgruntled growl, frame tensed and ready to throw himself at the electric field if the conversation showed any sign of taking a turn for the worse.   
“We don’t know much about the spark,” the neighbour mused. “A terrible holdover from our more religious days, I think.”  
“You’re not-” Flame steeled himself “-disgusted?”  
“Disgusted? No. I’m honestly quite impressed with your bravery. What did they call you when they were locking you in here and casting the key into the nearest supernova?”  
“Hitch or whatever called me a degenerate,” Flame said.   
“Uninspiring, but I guess he can’t help it.”   
“They called me mad,” Flame said quietly, sinking into memory. “A godless heathen, playing with things I could never understand. The mechs I would save would be abominations, they said. Better to let them die. Prowl stood in front of me as I knelt on the floor of my workshop in chains and he called me a monster. Ha! He’s one to talk. I said to him, ‘isn’t that what you wanted? A monster?’” Flame huffed a bitter laugh. “He didn’t seem to know what to say to that.”  
“Oh, it’s the impediment of scientific progress that’s truly monstrous,” the neighbour purred. “Tell me, what did they catch you doing?”   
“Full spark transplants,” Flame said conspiratorially, lowering his voice, enticed by the excitement in the neighbour’s gossiping tone.   
“What?” the neighbour sounded incredulous. “Without the life cord?”  
“Yes,” Flame said smugly. “I saw no reason why a damaged spark chamber should be a career-ending injury if the spark was still healthy.”  
“And were you successful?”  
“Well, uh, no,” Flame muttered. “But I was close, if fucking Prowl hadn’t interrupted my work I could have it by now, Primus damn him to the pit.”  
“I must say, I’m fascinated by your vision,” the neighbour mused. “Why, when most schools of thought would consider it immoral, did you think to do it?”  
“You know, nobody else asked that?” Flame said. “They mostly just asked ‘how could I’ - they didn’t bother to ask why.”  
“More’s the pity.”  
“I did it because it needed to be done,” Flame said. “That’s all.”  
“Spoken like a true scientist,” the neighbour said. Flame felt a warm little frisson of pride.   
“It’s just,” he began, “it’s the interplay between the processor and the spark that really made me consider it seriously, you know? So much of the basic information in the processor is codified on spark level too; your low-level personality components, even some memory. It felt like an invitation. I know it’s possible, I can just feel it.”  
“But Prowl ruined everything,” the neighbour surmised. “I know the feeling.”   
“Oh, you’ve had the pleasure?” Flame asked.   
“Just the once,” the neighbour explained. “Back on Cybertron he nearly got me sent down for a decade while he was on secondment to Kaon. I hear he hasn’t improved with age.”  
“He certainly hasn’t,” Flame agreed. “The amount of times he-”  
Flame stopped, screeching to a halt in the middle of a treatise on the miseries of Prowl as a commanding officer. Talking about Prowl was sure to out him as an Autobot immediately, and then where would he be?   
“-he almost caught up with me,” he finished lamely.   
“Mm.” the neighbour hummed noncommittally. “A nightmare. So, the Dire Wraiths? I’m still not sure what the connection was there.”  
“Without the data in front of me I can’t be sure there even is one,” Flame explained. “But I thought maybe if I thought of the spark as infecting the new frame, I could write a new initialisation sequence based on how the Wraiths bend the new host to their will. The spark could make the new frame comfortable. It could be the key.”  
“Fascinating,” the neighbour said, “especially for someone who didn’t even know what a Dire Wraith was before we started talking.”  
“I did too know what a Dire Wraith was.”  
“You literally thought I said dilate, you had no idea what I was talking about-”  
“That’s your fault, you need to learn to enunciate-”  
“None of this changes the fact this is an incredible area of study-”  
“Wait, really?”  
“Of course,” the neighbour said, nonplussed. “The taboo against studying the spark has always been ridiculous. We know so little about it.”  
“Not anymore,” Flame said smugly.  
“Exactly, not anymore,” the neighbour agreed. “Fear should never prevent scientific advancements from being made. I take my hat off to you.”  
“Hat?”  
“Oh my god,” the neighbour said. “What you must think of me? It’s another Earth saying, that’s all.  
“You really liked that planet, huh?” Flame asked.  
“It reminds me of home,” the neighbour said quietly. Flame wasn’t entirely sure he’d been meant to hear that, a suspicion that was confirmed when the neighbour then continued by saying “we’d make a great team, you know.”  
“Us?” Flame squeaked, and then covered his mouth to try and trap the embarrassing noise inside retroactively. There was nothing like sealing the hangar bay doors after the decepticons had already run off with the ship. That had been one of Shock’s favourite sayings; used whenever high command ordered them to do something particularly stupid and ineffectual. Flame thought he’d made it up himself.  
Flame’s cheeks were definitely glowing. How shameful.   
“The future of Cybertronian kind rests on my not inconsiderable shoulders,” the neighbour explained. “I’ve always known this. You seem to feel a similar kind of social responsibility.”  
“I don’t know.” Flame shifted uncomfortably. “Really I just wanted to see what would happen.”  
“I never said you couldn’t have fun while you were saving the species, did I?” The neighbour exclaimed. “But seriously, though. If I’d been able to hand over the data on Dire Wraiths that you wanted, how close would you be to solving the problem right now? Be honest with me.”  
“At least three quarters of the way to a new hypothesis,” Flame conceded.   
“Perfect match.” The neighbour slapped his thigh (presumably, from what Flame knew about frame language), making a resounding clang.   
“A hypothesis I can’t test,” Flame pointed out.   
“We won’t be in here forever,” the neighbour said confidently, “and then we can do all the testing we like.”  
“You know something I don't?” Flame tutted; he couldn’t stand that kind of attitude. Positivity really got his back up.  
“Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. Fact is, you and me are kindred sparks.”  
“You serious?” Flame asked, resenting his light and fluttery spark in a very big way.  
“Deadly. You’ve got this open scientific processor that’s just so rare in our species,” the neighbour… the neighbour gushed? “I honestly can’t think of anyone I’ve known who would have ever dared try what you have.”  
“I- wow,” was all Flame could say.   
“I just-” the neighbour stopped, and then started again “-I get the impression you don’t get that a lot so… I, uh, I need you to know that you’re impressive, alright? You’ve impressed me.”  
Flame couldn’t think of anything to say to that, but he felt sure that the odd stifled whining noise his fans made was audible from the other cell. The neighbour chuckled.   
“I bet you’d never tell me to ‘stop messing about with organics, you’ll catch something’.” The neighbour tried his best to put on a higher pitched voice and failed so dramatically that Flame fell about laughing.   
“Who- who was that meant to be?” he asked between heaving invents.  
“That’s my Starscream impression,” the neighbour admitted.   
“That was terrible,” Flame told him.   
“Thanks.” The neighbour sighed. “You know there was nothing about ridding the universe of organics in the Decepticon manifesto when I joined up? Some people just seemed to take it as a given.”  
“Nobody told me I couldn’t try and develop life-saving spark treatments,” Flame chimed in. “They just assumed I’d sit there and watch mechs die like the rest of them.”  
“Tarn once made me spend three weeks in quarantine after I’d visited Femax.”  
“I got called a heathen for asking a question about the life cord.”  
“Megatron said he didn’t see how it was possible that any organic civilization could have advanced enough technology to interest me. That was when I left.”  
“Most mechs I talked to literally seemed to think their spark ran on magic. None of them knew how it worked.”  
“Most people are stupid,” said the neighbour.   
“You’re right,” said Flame. “You’re so right. They really are. How can you just not care how your own body works?”  
“That’s why people like us need to stick together,” said the neighbour. “I’m so sorry you had to put up with that kind of disrespect for so long.”  
“Thanks.” Flame could get used to this. Flame could really, really get used to this. He was almost embarrassed at how easy he was to, well, to seduce, for want of a better word, but he hadn’t realised just how starving he was for the simple respect and consideration of a peer until the need was being fed.   
“You could…” Flame began, not quite believing himself as he began to speak aloud an idea that had never left his processor before. “You could even reignite a spark, I think. If the processor was undamaged enough, that is. The processor and the spark are so connected, but so separate at the same time. They both contain so much of the same information. It always felt like an invitation to try to me.”  
“You sneaky little necromancer,” the neighbour said, absolutely delighted. Flame glowed.   
“Anything for the advancement of science,” Flame said proudly.   
“If it ever looks like I’m going to kick the bucket, I’m calling you.”  
“Kick the… what?”  
“Another Earth term; don’t worry about it. Shame word never got as far as Megatron, really, he probably would have been up for coming back from the dead.”  
“I was never what you might call high-ranked,” Flame said ruefully. The less said about how far he’d really been from Megatron, the better. “I was more like cannon-fodder, really.”  
“Ah, you were-?”  
“The audacity they had, to be angry with me,” Flame spat, interrupting his neighbour’s realisation. “They had no right- I was trying to contribute. I’m the one that should be angry! I’m fighting a war for a planet I’ve never even fucking seen!”  
Flame stopped. His chest heaving with intakes of cooler air, he took stock of himself in the quiet of his cell. There was a rattling sound where that one misaligned cooling fan bumped up against one strut or another as it always did when he got heated. He’d looked into getting it fixed, but all the mechs on his line had had the same fault, so high command hadn’t considered it worth the bother. He was shorter than the average height for his size class, so the higher fuel needs of his unusual alt mode would be offset by his smaller stature, leaving him with as close to average fuel intake needs as could be managed. Command hadn’t tended to manage them. His feet were flat and sturdy, and his arms were the right length to comfortably hold the regulation external rifle. His trigger finger on both hands was reinforced. He was bright red and yellow, like a warning. Even his designation.  
“Yeah, I was a knock-off,” Flame said bitterly. “And I’m totally over it.”  
“Nobody with any sense would look down on you for being cold constructed,” the neighbour tried to assure him. The clicking sound that Flame was beginning to realise was some kind of stress response started up again. “Your scientific curiosity is twice as impressive, surviving so many careless battlefields. It takes a powerful will to pursue it against the wishes of everyone around you.”  
“It’s not just being cold constructed, though, is it,” Flame said. “I’m nothing to my faction. They didn’t care what I had to say about science; they just wanted a weapon. I’m expendable; hell, I’m basically cannon fodder. Back in the day, at least they made C.C. mechs for something. They made me- they made me to die.”   
His voice shuddered at the end and his vocaliser filled with unexplainable static, and to his horror, Flame realised that he might be in danger of crying.  
“And yet,” the neighbour murmured, quietly and gently, “you live. There’s something beautiful about that.”  
Flame’s spark, full to bursting with affection for this nameless mech that swept aside all his insecurities like there were nothing, fluttered inconveniently. Well, that was terrible.


End file.
